Sunday, February 3, 2013

FAME:Taylor Swift - A No Flying, No Tights Review

I had no illusions of quality or even basic competence as I began to read FAME: Taylor Swift. I’ve read too many comics by Bluewater Productions
to expect anything but the worst. What else could one expect from a
publishing company that has no editors or – at the very least – does not
credit them in their books? (Perhaps the editors of Bluewater Productions have pulled a collective Alan Smithe and refused credit for their work?) In any case, Bluewater Productions
has a reputation for dirty-dealing with freelancers and for hiring
anyone willing to draw in exchange for a “professional” credit. Note the
quotes around the word professional and that I am using a definition of
the word so loosely as to be inappropriate.

In my previous review of the FAME: The Cast of Glee (unauthorized) biography comic, I said that the artwork looked as if it had been created by taking photos from a Google Image
search and running them several times through a Photoshop filter, or
had been traced over a printed photograph. Judging by other reviews I’ve
read, I am not alone in this assessment and this is a frequent
complaint regarding other Bluewater Productions illustrated biographies.
Thankfully, I can make no such accusation regarding the artwork of Erick Adrian Marquez. Traced images or Photoshopped pictures would look far better.

Marquez’s penciling is, in a word, awful. There is no craft, no
character and no design at all in Marquez’s scribbling. The people
depicted are all misshapen and deformed. There are whole panels of this
comic that appear to have gone uninked, save for a black outline around
the individual characters. This outline, it should be noted, appears to
have been applied with either a Crayola black marker or the largest
paintbrush setting in MS Paint. To describe the artwork in this book as
amateurish would be to insult every amateur artist in the world. Indeed,
to call the graphics in this book artwork may be an insult to Art
itself. For that, I apologize.

The script for this book was written by C.W. Cooke and P.R. McCormack – the same team behind The Cast of Glee (unauthorized).
I mention this only so that I can relate that I discovered – while
confirming that the same team wrote both books –that McCormack’s last
name is misspelled on the title page of the Glee comic. As in that book, there are numerous other spelling errors and tense-troubles in the language of FAME: Taylor Swift,
along with several awkward, run-on sentences. (“She became a member of a
kid’s comedy group where her comedy blossomed and shined through,
something the world would get to see later on when she hosts Saturday Night Live.”)

FAME: Taylor Swift has no place in any quality
library collection. The artwork transcends mere putridness to become
something truly anathema. The script, while teaching me far more about
Taylor Swift’s life than I ever wanted to know, is rife with grammatical
mistakes and I keep wanting to pull out a red marker to start making
corrections. If you must have a Taylor Swift biography for your collection, please, find something else.